


i'd have you anytime

by heartofwinterfell



Category: Monty Python RPF
Genre: But in a fun way!, Discussion of Cannibalism, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24794452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofwinterfell/pseuds/heartofwinterfell
Summary: A late night conversation between two Pythons who definitely would not eat each other.[or, michael has a nightmare, eric's there to tell him it's all rubbish]
Relationships: Michael Palin/Eric Idle
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	i'd have you anytime

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/125538) by [Nyssa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyssa/pseuds/Nyssa). 



> I was originally going to post this anonymously, but then decided no anonymity, we own our current hyper-fixations like men.

“Still no sign of land. How long is it?”

“That’s a rather personal question don’t you think, Michael.”

“You stupid -”

The full line got caught in Michael’s throat. As his eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun coming off the water, he realized he was staring at Graham Chapman, not a weary naval officer. There was no prop life jacket slung snug around his neck. He had on a polo shirt and his pipe hung off his lip, though it was not lit. It looked like Graham, sitting back at a table read, only they were very much on a lifeboat, the sea rocking beneath them all and no sign of land anywhere.

“Alright there, Mike?”

Beside him, Terry also looked no different than he would on a writing day. Gone were any signs they were members of Her Majesty’s Navy. John was no captain. Though he had a hard look on his face, the kind he got just as Terry baited him into a quarrel, and when Michael caught his eye, he saw very little emotion there.

“How - long has it been?” Michael asked again. He felt real sweat on his brow.

“You know as well as the rest of us,” John said through gritted teeth. “Thirty-two days.”

“And we really have no food left?” If they were still following the line of the sketch, if they had not veered too far off course, there were cans of peaches tucked away and that would be enough to knock the dire look off John’s face. “Are we sure there isn’t -”

“Oh, enough of this.” John’s eyes bore into Michael’s, but there was a harsh glint in them now. His lips curled, almost on the verge of a smirk. “You know what you have to do.”

“We’ve been waiting long enough already,” Graham said, mouthing at his pipe, his face expressionless.

“You’re letting us starve, Mike.” When Michael turned to face Terry, he didn’t recognize the man sitting beside him. Terry’s eyes, always so full passion, were devoid of any feeling, just as John’s had been. He looked at Michael as though he were not a friend, nor even a person, just a thing to be ripped apart.

“Eric?”

Eric was all he had left. Eric who had not said anything, who had seemed to disappear in Graham’s shadow since the moment this horror show began. Eric would never -

“Who did you expect it to be, Palin?” The man who said that was not Eric. He wore Eric’s face like a mask, a twisted and pale imitation of it. But this monster with Eric’s blue eyes looked at Michael like he wanted to tear out his throat. “Now are you going to do the right thing and do it yourself? Or are you going to make us do it?”

There was something light and sharp in Michael’s hands now. It nicked at the pads of his fingers. He had to do the right thing and do it himself. Anything to escape their bloodthirsty gazes. He had to do the right thing. Anything for the Pythons, anything for Eric.

He was letting them starve.

Anything -

Michael awoke with a start. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he already knew he was not trapped on a boat, far out at sea. Nothing was rocking or moving except perhaps his own heaving chest and shaking hands.

It had been nothing more than a dream.

His eyes spied the clock on the bedside table that told him it was nearing three. Michael sighed - shoot day tomorrow, long drive ahead, no time to waste lying awake and parsing out a silly nightmare. Close your eyes, Michael thought, close your eyes and fall asleep.

The moment he closed his eyes, he saw Terry licking his lips and Graham with blood on his incisors.

His own teeth chattering, Michael gathered up the blankets more tightly around himself. The man sleeping beside him shuffled a little closer to the center of the bed, chasing after the warmth Michael had stolen away.

“Don’t wake him,” Michael whispered to himself. Shoot day tomorrow, long drive ahead, tireless work for the both of them. No time to wade through sodding nightmares in the small hours of the morning.

Michael curled his knees closer to his chest and resolved to sleep.

When his eyes closed again, he saw John holding the knife, ready to run it across his neck. All Michael could do was shoot out his arms to try and hold him back.

“Stop moving.” 

So much for not waking Eric. He had his back to Michael and didn’t seem intent on changing that, though suddenly Michael was overcome by how much he wanted Eric to sleepily tug him into his arms, whisper something devastatingly witty into the crown of his head, and let him fall asleep with his ear pressed against his steady heartbeat. It was all a bit soppy and embarrassing and far too much to ask of Eric as the clock ticked ever closer to three in the morning.

“Sorry.” Michael shifted to lying flat on his back, eyes trained on the darkened ceiling, and did his best to remain still. His joints started locking up immediately, tension spreading from his neck down to his toes, but Michael screwed his eyes shut and tried to count sheep roosting in the trees.

“That’s even worse,” Eric murmured. When he turned his head to look at him, Michael saw he too had shifted onto his back, his eyes still closed, but he was frowning, the kind Michael learned a long time ago meant he was displeased. “What’s wrong, then?”

Michael opened his mouth - “And don’t bloody say nothing” - and promptly shut it again.

He was left with nothing to say then, really. There were great invisible lines drawn in the sands of this new relationship he and Eric found themselves in and the one rule was you did not cross them. Even using the word relationship constituted tapping a toe on one of said dangerous lines. Having whispered, intimate conversations in the middle of the night might as well be using the lines for long jumping. The Pythons - the whole lot - they were pint drinking friends, wasn’t that what Eric always said? They were the chaps you drank one with at the end of a long workday and talked about the game. What game? Who cared, so long as no one started crying into their ale and unloaded all their deepest vulnerabilities onto the others.

That wasn’t what Eric needed Michael for.

“You think so loud, Palin,” Eric said with a sigh. As he rolled onto his side, facing Michael, his eyes finally opened. They looked stormy blue in the dark. “It’s like Cleese always says. You spend too much energy trying to be affable. It keeps you from telling us what you’re really thinking.”

“I do not,” Michael said with, what he can admit, may appear to be a childish pout.

“Do too,” Eric said with a sleepy, slow smirk.

“Do -” Michael cut himself and tried not to fume as he watched Eric snicker. “Bloody jealous, you are, that you didn’t get to be in that sketch.”

“And deprive John of his favorite little scene partner?”

And there it was, right back to the heart of it. Michael’s mind flashed back to John with the predatory gleam in his eyes. John would kill every last one of them if it meant being free, but there was little comfort in being devoured with company.

Eric’s hand came to brush his matted bangs from his forehead and Michael flinched. Despite the long shadows cloaking the room, he swore he saw a flash of hurt cross Eric’s face. “Now what’s really the matter?”

Michael swallowed and pressed his face a little further into the pillow, doing his best to muffle his answer. “Bad dream.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so sooner?” Eric asked, his voice pitching up in volume, so simply slipping into an Eric-character. “You’re talking to the foremost expert on bad dreams, from the ghastly to the downright gruesome. There’s nothing so horrid you can tell me that I, Mr. Idle, have not already experienced tenfold. So unload yourself, Mikey, the doctor is in.”

Michael had the sudden and strong desire to smoother Eric with a pillow, but he’d be laughing as he did it. Already a smile threatened to break across his face and, as he so easily did nowadays, Eric had won.

“You know the sketch we did, back in the second series, the one where we were naval officers stranded on a lifeboat?”

“I seem to recall I wanted to eat Jonesy, but you couldn’t because he wasn’t kosher.” Eric chuckled, clearly replaying the scene back on a reel in his mind. “Dreaming of cannibals are you? That’s very gruesome indeed, Michael.”

“It wasn’t just about any cannibals,” Michael insisted, his hands twisting in the bedsheet. “It was us, all of us. We were on the lifeboat, only it wasn’t an argument about who we were eating. You all just knew. None of you even questioned it.”

Eric stared at him for a long moment, unblinking, and Michael squirmed under the gaze. That was something Michael had yet to get used to - how Eric looked at him sometimes, for a long time, completely out of any character and without anyone else in the room. It was like Michael was a stubborn sketch that he just couldn’t break. It was Eric, taking him apart.

Then, just as he had stripped Michael down to all his most basic parts, Eric said evenly, “That’s absolute rubbish and you know it.”

Michael sputtered. “What?”

“Why would we eat the one we all like best?” Eric asked, though it sounded purely rhetorical.

“ _Like_ doesn’t enter it -”

“It bloody well does,” Eric said. Then, as Michael opened his mouth to retort, Eric asked, “Was Gilliam on the raft?”

Michael shook his head.

“Lucky bastard,” Eric muttered before continuing, “It seems the logical conclusion your brain couldn’t reach is you’d all eat me.”

“What?” Michael saw Eric wince, no doubt from how loud Michael’s voice had gotten. “Why is that the _logical_ conclusion?”

“Well, you’d all get a vote, see,” Eric said, speaking slowly as if explaining it all to a thick-headed schoolboy. “Graham would obviously vote to save Cleese, and Cleese’d begrudgingly vote to save Gray out of Cambridge loyalty. Jonesy votes to save you and -”

“Well, who’s to say I wouldn’t vote to save you?” Michael cut in, stopping Eric from finishing with what every other Python would declare to be the natural order of things.

“You wouldn’t vote to save or eat anybody,” Eric said, his voice dropping back down to a whisper. “You couldn’t. Not if it was real.”

He left no room for argument and Michael’s heart clenched.

Running away from the feeling as any repressed Brit was want to do, Michael let out a tut. “You make me sound like a bloody saint.”

“Not a saint,” Eric said. “Just -”

“Too nice,” came out in unison.

Eric smiled at him, a little sleepy around the edges, and there, again, Michael’s treacherous heart veered off its natural rhythm. Eric’s eyes began to close, as though he had put the conversation to bed and thus he could follow, but Michael found himself unsatisfied.

“That still doesn’t explain _logically_ how it’d end up being you.”

“Ah, they’d wear you down eventually. Because they’d assume deep down you’d really want to save Jonesy,” Eric said with a shrug, back behind the cloak of the argument. “Then they’d get to thinking I’m the only one who hasn’t got someone. I’m the loner, always have been. You eat the chap like that first.”

Eric said it all so matter-of-factly, as though reading it from a teleprompter script written long before Michael was ever plagued by bad dreams. Not for the first time, Michael wondered if Eric got lonely, if he ever wanted to sit in the same room with someone else and write. There’d be no talking, no collaborating, but he’d know someone else was there. Somewhere behind the cheekiness and the carefully maintained independence, there was a man who wanted a guaranteed someone to vouch for him on the lifeboat.

If Michael asked, there’d be no telling how many walls would go up. Even if they were made of the cheap plaster and plywood of their studio sets, Michael hated being on the outside of them. So he went for a set up instead. “Well, suppose Gilliam’s also there…”

“Oh, we’d eat him no question,” Eric said, effortlessly hitting it home. “We’d start going after him before our stomachs were growling! He’s American after all. They must taste like barbecue.”

And just like that, Michael was giggling. He didn’t particularly like the image of his co-worker and good friend roasting on a rod over a roaring fire, but his mind conjured it up anyway. Not helping was Eric digging his fingers into Michael’s sides, impervious to his squirming. Eric was laughing, too, and Michael was struck by how young he looked. It took him back to the days of _Do Not Adjust Your Set_ , when nothing felt so good in the world as making Eric laugh.

On the come down, Eric swept his hand down Michael’s side and asked, “What made you think it’d really be you?”

Too happy living in the moment of Eric smiling and laughing with him, Michael moved his hand to rest on the pillow, just above Eric’s head, and began playing with the soft strands of his hair. “Oh, I don’t know, really -”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Yes, you do. Spit it out.”

There they were again, approaching one of those damned lines again, but when had Michael denied Eric anything else tonight, or any other. And he was too tired now to weave some impressive lie, not that Eric wouldn’t see right through it. He always did.

“I suppose you lot would expect it from me,” Michael said finally. “And I expect I’d let you.”

“Oh Christ, Michael.” Eric gave a long suffering sigh as if he were a put-upon husband to one of their shrieking pepperpots. Michael tried not to let it sting.

“You couldn’t push me around if I didn’t let you,” he insisted. “Maybe John’s right - all I want is to be affable, so much so I’d let you chop my arm off and eat it in front of me. I want to make you all happy.”

“John just wants everyone to be as grumpy as he is.” Eric’s arm slid further around his waist, his hand splaying across the small of his back. “We all push you around because we’re insecure gits who realize you’re the best of us and we’re scared if we don’t get our way, we’ll get outshone.”

“That’s not -”

“But we’d never expect you to give up everything for us,” Eric said. “And when I say we all like you the most, let me tell you that bloody well does enter into it. What, you think I want to spend what might be my last days on this earth listening to Jonesy and Cleese’s miserable arguing? No sir, I’d throw myself overboard, you know I would.”

Somehow, Michael was laughing again. He pressed his face against Eric’s chest and felt the rumblings of his own laughter against his cheek.

When it subsided once more, Michael said softly, “You know we wouldn’t count you off just because you’re not on some silly writing team. There’s no first one to go.”

Eric hummed, but said nothing, though Michael felt his face rest softly against his hair.

Michael turned his head up slightly, pressing a light kiss to Eric’s jaw, and whispered, “And besides, Terry and John would kill each other after the first day and that’s you, me, and Graham sorted.”

The laugh that elicited warmed Michael down to his toes.

And without missing a beat, Eric cleared his throat and adopted his complaint-reading tone: “Dear sirs, we would like to disagree in the strongest possible terms to the characterization that we, T. Jones and J. Cleese, would kill each other if forced to spend too much time together. We would have you know we have often been forced to spend long shoot days in each other’s company and only once have we thought to resort to cannibalism -”

“Only once is generous of you,” Michael said through his laughter. “Though we don’t put them opposite each other very often, do we?”

“In the name of preserving sanity,” Eric said, though sanity was a word they very seldom used without a touch of mockery. As if reading Michael’s mind, he added, “Why’ve we even been talking like any of us would survive? Cleese and Jones kill each other, Graham chucks himself overboard without his drink, and -”

“We’d make it to shore.”

That had Eric looking at him again, trying to find the way to break in. Maybe that was why Michael hadn’t gotten used to it yet. He always fancied himself the sort of chap who read like an open, rather dull book. He thought he gave himself away with every look that crossed his face. If Eric only told him what he was looking for, Michael would give it to him.

“I was going to say I’d off myself from sheer boredom and you’d follow close after because you couldn’t bear to be alone,” Eric said and then more carefully, oddly avoiding Michael’s eyes, “You’d really bet on you and me?”

Michael shrugged, not because he didn’t care, but because it seemed an easy answer. If the rest shook out the way Eric said it would, Michael still thought he and Eric could drag themselves over the finish line. “I could never see you giving up just from boredom. You’re scrappier than that.”

“Is that so?” Eric asked with a suddenly devious smirk.

All at once, Michael found himself on his back, Eric hovering over him, hands braced on either side of his head. Michael swallowed, the hungry glint in Eric’s eyes that had awoken him what felt like hours ago now no longer terrifying in the least.

“Yes, I think you’d find ways to entertain yourself.” Michael shifted himself up on his elbows, his lips almost brushing Eric’s as he whispered, “You’d make up songs.”

Eric ducked his head down and the smile pressed against Michael’s throat made his toes curl. “Make up songs, eh?”

“Something -” Michael’s breath was starting to come out in stops and stutters as Eric blazed a trail down his chest with his lips and his tongue. “...something like that.”

In this one respect, Michael had no qualms with Eric eating him alive.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) This work was inspired by the great "Dream" by Nyssa. If you are somehow reading this, thank you for all the well-written gifts you gave this minuscule fandom.
> 
> 2) Anyway, lord forgive me my sins. Hope you enjoyed and you're staying safe out there!


End file.
